


Between life and death, he meets him

by NGC1705



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Reincarnation, Transmigration, spoilers for ch670
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 07:38:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1379359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NGC1705/pseuds/NGC1705
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A forgotten encounter in limbo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between life and death, he meets him

A nearly inaudible drop of water brings him to focus. Eyes blink slowly, adjusting to an infinite white expanse. Face-down as Hashirama had let him fall, Madara rests with his hair strewn about his shoulders, floating still in the water surrounding him.  
Hashirama had been unwilling to spare him even that dignity.

He no longer feels the rain upon his back.   
He no longer feels.

Madara is dead.

The water he lays in is warm like the water of a river in early autumn, clear and clean and comforting. Nostalgic. Yet, here, no gentle breeze comes to ruffle his hair and push away the stink of blood and betrayal. Nostalgic enough to tug at the edges of his frayed heart, but not enough to fool his weary mind into believing that he has reached a place of peace.  
There is no peace for him. Here, there is only emptiness; emptiness to reflect that of his heart and his mind, emptiness to reflect everything that Hashirama had given him in the end.  
It all reeks of poetic justice, and if Madara had the energy he would have laughed.

A silhouette sits languidly at the edge of his vision. A familiar hand rests on an equally familiar knee, stark against the white cloth he always wore. Madara tenses and looks no further, knowing and dreading what he would see.

He's here.  
Of course he is.

_Will you haunt me even after countless deaths?_

He doesn't answer. He heard; Madara knows he did, and yet he refuses to answer. It's so like him. It's infuriating.  
The sting of a thousand betrayals over a thousand lifetimes shoots deep within his body, inciting an ever-smouldering rage to flare into its inferno.   
He burns, so he screams.

"How could you abandon me? You and my brother— you were all I had, and yet you both betrayed me! _How could you?!_ "

No answer.  
Of course there wouldn't be.  
Furious, Madara raises himself to his knees, whirling around to face his oppressor with a fierce scowl, tasting blood and bile on his lips as his eyes burn with the weight of endless, unshed tears.

" _How could you do this to me, Father?"_

Two voices; words that were his own and yet not.

Madara stops.

Before the question could form in his mind, the world breaks. Images scatter into colourless petals, a whirling cyclone, and everything curls inward. Threads of his consciousness pull taut against the fabric of existence as images snap into place, bright and overwhelming. Rain against a charred field. Ash mixed with blood. The glint of a sword before an impossibly pure moon. Teeth. Flesh. _Devouring._ A shrine, his shrine— _their_ shrine— burns as he stands amidst the destruction, flames licking his hands like loyal dogs welcoming their master, and bared everywhere is proof of his weakness.  
Awareness stirs; the cyclone swallows him into white infinity. A keen rings not from his own lips but out from the void, unrelenting, engulfing all until it became all, and as he sinks deeper into the water, the mire, the filth that fills his ears, his nose, his lungs,  Madara  realises  that death feels much like birth; only, in reverse.

A breath.

His body.

Deeply, through his nose, he breathes.  
The pain is sharp and unkind. Cells knit together torn flesh of an empty organ to reform a pulse, even as the blade stands still through the muscle. Mechanically, Madara pushes his beaten body to sit on his heels. One hand reaches behind him to grip the blade. Madara tugs, minutely aware of it slicing into his palm, until the sword slides out of his chest with a slick sound.

The rain had long since stopped. Mud drips from his face, the ends of his hair, but he makes no move to wipe it off. He presses his hands to his chest, releasing what chakra that had accumulated while he was unconscious into the wound to heal it.

It still bleeds.  
Madara is still dead.

**Author's Note:**

> tbh I'm not all that happy with the reincarnation thing in canon but w/e  
> since naruto and sasuke get to see hagoromo while they're dead, I wondered if all of indra's and ashura's reincarnations would be able to as well


End file.
